Steve Schwartz writes:

>There's so little of new or unusual music played at all, you'd think that
>someone could say "what the hell" and zone out for 20-30 minutes while it
>went on.  In other words, I wish others would extend to me the courtesy
>I regularly extend to them.  Instead, I hear loud bitter complaints of
>"cultural Stalinism" on those infrequent occasions when anything remotely
>unusual - Nielsen, Bartok, Stravinsky - is played.  Given the performance
>figures of new and old music, which of us is being force-fed?

Hereabouts there's quite a bit of new and unusual music available, both
live and over the two classical music stations within my range.  On the
radio the new stuff is only a small problem because you can always push the
other button.  It's also no problem at,say, the Salzburg Festival where the
ever-green is presented in segregation of the ever-new.  You pay for either
an evening of Mozart and what goes with it, or for a matinee of Nono, and
whatever is deemed to go with that.

There's a problem when the program tries to please both the Hatfields and
the McCoys.  Webern, sandwiched between Mendelssohn and Haydn, usually
works because Anton is mercifully succinct.  Henze does not, because he
never lets go of the audience's lapels.  Bartok poses a problem of a
different sort:  his stuff is on the verge of acceptance by large-hall
audiences.  Whether he clicks or not on a particular day at a particular
venue depends on the contemporaneous disposition of the audience, which
will either applaud grudgingly, or with relief, or gladly.  Stravinsky,
most of him anyway, is accultured.  Cage hasn't a prayer.

Anyway, most folks don't go to concerts to hear soemthing new.  They go
to hear something they know they'll like.  How they get to know what to
like should be largely their own business--except that here in Germany the
state still makes it its business to manage Bildung because that is what
is expected of it.  However, the management's getting more gingerly, more
miserly by the year.  And, as the state has been pushing new music, its
fans most hope that the process of acculturation speeds up before music is
obliged to pay its own way.  Oh, and records pose no problem at all:  you
buy what you want, and you play them when and where you will.  There's no
dearth of new music recordings here.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:100766.2076@compuserve